SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
Nature Astronomy Don Gurnett, Bill Kurth University of Iowa Voyager 1 has a companion in the realm of the stars. Researchers at the University of Iowa report that the spacecraft Voyager 2 has entered the interstellar medium (ISM), the region of space outside the bubble-shaped boundary produced by wind streaming outward from the sun. Voyager … Read more
Mary Ann Sweeney 61st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories physicists Mark Boslough and Dave Crawford predicted the Hubble Space Telescope would see a rising vapor plume as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashed into the far side of Jupiter (Figure 1) in 1994. And … Read more
The first reports of seismic activity and ground vibrations on Mars are in. The red planet has a moderate level of seismic activity, intermediate between Earth and the Moon. An international team that includes University of Maryland geologists released preliminary results from the InSight mission, which landed a probe on Mars on November 26, 2018. … Read more
Using the Dutch-led Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, astronomers have discovered unusual radio waves coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. The radio waves bear the tell-tale signature of aurorae caused by an interaction between a star and its planet. The radio emission from a star-planet interaction has been predicted for over thirty-years … Read more
The early solar system was a chaotic place, with evidence indicating that Mars was likely struck by planetesimals, small protoplanets up to 1,200 miles in diameter, early in its history. Southwest Research Institute scientists modeled the mixing of materials associated with these impacts, revealing that the Red Planet may have formed over a longer timescale … Read more
In the hunt for Earth-like exoplanets – Earth analogues in distant solar systems – astronomers rely on highest precision spectrographs in order to detect the minute Doppler shift in the spectrum of their host stars. The shift is caused by the reflex motion of the star around the common center of mass in the planet-star-system … Read more
Back in 1972, NASA sent their last team of astronauts to the Moon in the Apollo 17 mission. These astronauts brought some of the Moon back to Earth so scientists could continue to study lunar soil in their labs. Since we haven’t returned to the Moon in almost 50 years, every lunar sample is precious. … Read more
Working together with space researchers, Finnish amateur photographers have discovered a new auroral form. Named ‘dunes’ by the hobbyists, the phenomenon is believed to be caused by waves of oxygen atoms glowing due to a stream of particles released from the Sun. In the recently published study, the origins of the dunes were tracked to … Read more
Several billion light years from our Galaxy, blazars are relentlessly accelerating particles to extreme energies. What do we know about these extreme sources of radiation? A team of ten researchers from France (Paris Observatory, IN2P3), Germany (ESO, DESY, University of Munich) and Italy (ASI, INAF) coordinated by Jonathan Biteau (IJC Lab, University Paris-Saclay, CNRS) and … Read more
Astronomers have found a ‘vampire’ star in the midst of a feeding frenzy, with the help of an automated program that is sifting through archived data from the decommissioned Kepler Space Telescope. The research is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The new program acts like a detective to find clues of … Read more